How to Search the SharePoint Recycle Bin

Category: Recovery and Restore  |  Updated: 14 August 2026

The SharePoint Online recycle bin has a search box, and most of the time that is all you need. It gets frustrating quickly, though, because it matches on one field and one stage of one site collection at a time. This guide covers what the built-in search actually does, how to reach the second-stage bin, how to narrow by deletion date when there is no date filter, and where you have to leave the browser behind.

What the Built-In Recycle Bin Search Actually Matches

The search box filters the currently loaded bin by item name. The match is case-insensitive and partial, so typing budget finds Q2 Budget Final v3.xlsx and marketing budget 2025.xlsx alike. That is the whole feature. Everything below is not searchable from the browser:

Searching the First-Stage Recycle Bin

1. Go to the site that held the item. This is the step people get wrong. Recycle bins are per site collection, so you must be on the site where the item lived, not on a hub or the admin centre.
2. Open the recycle bin. Click the gear icon, choose Site contents, then Recycle bin in the toolbar. Appending /_layouts/15/RecycleBin.aspx to the site URL gets you there directly.
3. Search on a distinctive fragment. Enter part of the name rather than the whole thing. Users misremember file names constantly, and a short fragment such as a project code or a client name survives that better than a full title with a version suffix.
4. Restore what you find. Tick the item and click Restore. It returns to its original location with version history and metadata intact.

Searching the Second-Stage Recycle Bin

When someone empties the first-stage bin, the items are not gone. They move to the second-stage bin, which belongs to the site collection and is visible only to site collection administrators. It has its own search box, and searching the first stage does not search it.

1. Go to the top-level site of the site collection, not a subsite, and open Site settings from the gear icon.
2. Under Site Collection Administration, click Recycle bin. If you cannot see that section, you are not a site collection administrator and cannot reach the second stage.
3. Switch to the second-stage view. Choose Deleted from end user Recycle Bin to list second-stage items only.
4. Search and restore as normal. The search box behaves exactly as it does in the first stage, matching on name.

Narrowing by Deletion Date Without a Date Filter

There is no date range filter in the recycle bin. What you have is a sortable Deleted column, which is enough for a single known deletion and painful for anything else.

1. Open the relevant stage of the bin.
2. Click the Deleted column header to sort by deletion date, and click again to reverse the order.
3. Read down to the period the deletion happened in.
4. If you also know part of the name, search first and then sort the filtered results. That combination is the closest the browser gets to a real query, and it is genuinely useful when the same file was deleted and restored several times.

This falls apart on a busy site collection. Sorting several thousand rows to find everything deleted during one afternoon is not a workflow, and it is the point at which most administrators go looking for another tool.

When the Built-In Search Is Not Enough

Three situations regularly defeat the browser:

• You know the date, not the name. A user reports that "everything in the project folder disappeared on Tuesday". There is no way to query that.
• You know who, not what. An account was compromised or a departing employee deleted content, and you need everything they removed. Deleted By is a column, not a filter.
• You do not know the site. The bins are separate, so an unknown location means opening candidate sites one after another.

PowerShell handles the first two. Get-PnPRecycleBinItem returns the bin as objects you can filter on DeletedDate or DeletedByEmail, which is exactly what the browser will not do. It still runs per site collection, and it still needs someone comfortable writing the query.

Filtering the Recycle Bin with Recycle Master

Recycle Master in ShareMaster takes the same approach as the PowerShell route, without the scripting. You connect it to a site collection, choose the first or second stage, and it pages the whole bin down before you filter it. Because the filtering happens locally rather than in the browser, the fields the recycle bin only lets you sort by become fields you can actually filter on:

• Free text on the item name
• Original location
• Item type
• Author
• The account that deleted the item
• A deleted-before and deleted-after date range, which is the filter the browser is missing

You can combine all of them in one pass, switch between the first and second stage from the same screen, and sort the results by name, location, type, author, deleted-by, deletion date or size. From there you can restore or permanently remove what the filter matched.

One thing to be clear about, because it decides whether this solves your problem: Recycle Master works on one site collection at a time. It does not search every bin in the tenant at once. Nothing does, Microsoft included. What it removes is the per-site scripting and the sort-and-scroll, not the need to know roughly where the content lived.

For a side-by-side of the two approaches, see Recycle Master vs the SharePoint recycle bin and SharePoint recycle bin search options compared. Once you have found the items, the bulk restore guide covers recovering them in one operation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you search the SharePoint recycle bin by file type?

Not with the built-in search, which matches on item name only. You can sort by the Type column to group extensions together, but you cannot restrict results to a single type. A tool that loads the bin and filters it locally, such as Recycle Master, does offer a type filter.

Why can I not find a deleted file in the SharePoint recycle bin?

Usually one of four reasons: you are searching the wrong site collection, since each has its own separate bin; the item has moved to the second stage, which needs site collection administrator rights; an administrator emptied the bin; or the 93-day retention window has closed and the item has been purged. Work through them in that order, because the first is by far the most common and the cheapest to check.

How far back does the SharePoint recycle bin go?

93 days in total, counted from when the item was first deleted. Both stages share that single window rather than getting 93 days each. After it closes, the recycle bin cannot help and recovery depends on Microsoft 365 Backup or a third-party backup that captured the content beforehand. See recovering files from an emptied recycle bin for the options at that point.

Can I search every site collection's recycle bin at once?

No. Recycle bins are scoped per site collection, and neither the SharePoint admin centre nor any Microsoft interface searches across all of them. If the site is unknown you work through the candidates one at a time, whichever tool you use. Be sceptical of any product claiming a true tenant-wide recycle bin search, ours included.

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